Anxieties of a Bank Cashier
A short story by David Brining
Copyright 2012 David Brining
All rights reserved
NINA Ribakova counted the bank notes again, just to make certain, then secured them with an elastic band. She entered the total sum into the ledger and initialled it NR. She glanced firstly at the closed door of the manager's office and next at the papers, banknotes and identification documents on her desk. Andrey Andreyevich had been with this client for nearly an hour. Usually he would tell her to break up any meeting after twenty minutes with an 'urgent' telephone call, and, as he greeted the customer with a hearty handshake and a slap on the shoulder, he would wink at her conspiratorially. Today, however, as he had ushered the tall, golden-haired media mogul through to his office, he had looked hard at Nina and said "No calls today." Still, the meeting had continued for an extraordinarily long time and Nina was beginning to wonder if she had missed something, if the "No calls" had been for Mr Priapin's benefit and was really a coded message, or whether it was genuine.
Nina caught sight of the framed photograph of her husband set on the desk close to the telephone. Poor Kolya seemed to spend most of his time worrying. She supposed that sitting in the kiosk all day with only a cheap paperback novel and a trickle of customers to occupy his attention drove him to worry. There was nothing else to do, nothing else to keep him sane. Unfortunately, she worried about his worrying and it all drove Ivan to distraction.
''Enough of the worrying,'' he would say. ''We're OK. We're all healthy, we're all happy, we've got a home, you've both got jobs, I'm getting 4s and 5s at school…what's to worry about?''
Losing these things, that was what. But they did not tell him so.
She looked at his photograph in the frame next to his father's. They looked alike. The picture was two years old and had been taken at Kalach-on-Don. It showed Vanya with her brother. Vanya was wearing his favourite green and yellow sweater and green 'Recbok' trousers and was holding a small silver fish between the finger and thumb of his left hand. He grinned self-consciously from under his floppy nut- brown fringe. He hated having his photograph taken. Behind him, dozens of silver birch trees formed a tall, straight picket. Beside him stood his uncle Igor, the clown with a bushy moustache, the balding head, the forty-a-day habit, the wife so fat her dresses resembled tents but who laughed all the time, the seven year old daughter with pigtails and a temper on whom Vanya had spent so much time and patience when they'd all gone to the Black Sea together last summer...
Nina missed her brother. He never worried. Everything was a tremendous joke to him. He had moved to Pushkin, near St Petersburg, to be nearer his in-laws, who were marooned in Tallinn on the other side of the border. There was a possibility that they might visit in the summer, perhaps even repeat the Black Sea experience. She knew that Vanya was desperately keen to go again. Possibly they could send him to stay in Pushkin but then she knew that Kolya would worry himself sick. Igor was likely to introduce the boy to vodka and maybe even cigarettes. Nina was realistic enough to know that, at fifteen, he'd almost certainly drunk beer, if not hard liquor, and probably tried a cigarette or two. After all, both she and Kolya had smoked on and off for years, including in Vanya's presence. They also tried vodka shots at New Year with their neighbours so of course he would try it, and Kolya had told he suspected that Ivan and his friends drank themselves stupid every day when they got home from school at 2 o'clock. They had never, however, seen Vanya drunk or smelled anything on his clothes, but Kolya still worried.
One day, overcome with anxiety, he had asked his son directly what he did when he came home from school.
"Eat, watch TV, play football," came the response, "Then study. What else?"
"You don't sit around with Artëm and Alex drinking beer, then?"
"Of course I don't!" Vanya's indignation had been convincing and satisfied even his father, until the boy's fabulous mischievous grin had broken over his face and he'd added "We save the beer for Saturday nights when you work late."
"Maybe he's doing drugs," had been Kolya's next anxiety. "They say you can get heroin in Spartanovka."
Poor dear Nikolai. All these little anxieties, chipping away at him, shrinking him down, eating away day after day. Now he really had something to worry about. When the ambulance had come to take Ivan to Hospital 7, Kolya had virtually tugged his beard out at the roots. Vanya was pale and strained beneath what was left of his summer suntan and they knew he had not slept that night. They had heard him in and out of the bathroom till about three a.m. Kolya had closed up the kiosk and taken the day off work to wait at the hospital. He'd promised to telephone as soon as he had any news. Vanya had maintained a show of bravado, as was only fitting, but his face was drawn tight with fear as they had wheeled him away with a drip in his arm.
God only knew what would happen if they lost him. It would kill the grandparents, probably Nikolai too. Ivan was their world. And Nina? What of Nina herself? She stared at her son and his fish, his first fish. She was strong. She knew that. Her parents had made her strong. Igor had clowned his way out of their home, infuriating Father and offending their mother, especially when he'd gone to Estonia and married a local girl, but she couldn't clown, the awkward, studious older daughter. She'd had to struggle against her parents' stifling restrictions, mostly in silence, and her rebellion, her act of defiance had been to marry Nikolai Ribakov and move to the city. She sensed her father had still not forgiven her but the alternative life, the stifling life in that dusty, dead-end village without her husband, without her son, the alternative life which she sometimes trailed through her imagination in idle moments was unspeakably dreary, unbearably dull, a life with some rural ox of a farmer, some country clod with a herd of cows, or, even worse, a life on the dacha tending the chickens, Nina Yurivna Zemlanskoya, eternal spinster of Kalach-on-Don, imprisoned at home, her future nailed to the cross of her mother's religion and hammered to the sickle of her father's.
She looked once again at the silver fish dangling from Vanya's long, slim fingers. Her world too would end if Vanya died.
The door clicked open and the familiar genial banter of two businessmen having reached an agreement invaded her office.
"I'll have Nina type the papers at once," said her manager, "And we'll send them over by courier this afternoon."
"Excellent." Sergey Petrovich smoothed his golden hair, straightened his Italian silk tie and shook hands with Andrey Andreyevich. Then, with a courteous "Good morning", he left the office.
"That's some man," said Andrey Andreyevich, whistling with admiration. "Our next deputy, mark my words. He's such a cool customer." Andrey Andreyevich was overweight, constantly perspiring, balding and his ill-fitting clothes always looked crumpled. "Any news from the hospital?"
"Not yet." Nina clipped the Priapin papers together.
"You should have taken time off," the manager told her. "If one of my kids were under the knife, I'd sleep by the door of the theatre."
"Kolya's there," she said. "He worries enough for all three of us."
Andrey Andreyevich examined the photograph of his secretary's husband. It showed a pre-beard Nikolai sitting in a chair outside a tent in a forest. He was peeling potatoes and had removed his shirt. He looked mildly surprised. Vanya had taken the picture last summer.
"Call the hospital," Andrey said., "Then go for lunch." He replaced the photograph.
"Mr Priapin's papers..."
"Can wait for a mother's anxieties," said Andrey Andreyevich.
So Nina telephoned Hospital 7. The receptionist was particularly shocked by this particular impertinence.
"I'm sure your husband would telephone if he had any news. He does have your n
umber, doesn't he?"
"Please," said Nina, "I just want to talk to him."
"It's a perfectly straightforward operation, Mrs Ribakova," the receptionist told her.
"Please," said Nina.
"I might not be able to find him," said the receptionist.
"Please," said Nina.
The receptionist heaved a huge sigh. Minutes later, the familiar voice of Nikolai Nikolayevich came on the line.
"Nina! What's wrong? What's happened?" He sounded frantic.
"Nothing. I wondered if you had any news."
"They're still operating," said Kolya. "Four hours nine minutes. I'm sure something's wrong."
"It's a five hour operation, Mr Ribakov," Nina heard the receptionist say. "Microsurgery can't be rushed."
"I don't like hospitals," Kolya said peevishly. "The smells, the colours .... everything's green. It's supposed to make you feel calm, but it doesn't."
"You and Vanya might as well live in that hospital," Nina said, trying to lighten the mood. "Every month one or other of you goes in for stitches in some cut or other. Last summer your head, spring Vanya's hand, winter Vanya's head, autumn your hand, then he burned his leg..." The tradition of the Family Ribakov. Visits to the Emergency Room.
"Take care," said Kolya as he hung up. "Try not to worry. It's so bad for your blood pressure." Nina
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